


when the days were long

by strikinglight



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Alternate Universe - Beach, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Childhood Friends, F/F, Friends to Lovers, Growing Up Together, Photography, Summer Vacation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-19
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-12-13 14:05:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11761476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: Before today, Soleil has only ever watched the boats from a distance.Soleil and Ophelia share their summers.





	when the days were long

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dragonsHourglass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonsHourglass/gifts).



> For Mo, for the FE Femsplash Exchange. Among the lovely prompts you provided the idea of Sophelia + summer/beaches was just heaven to me, so thank you. <3 I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed putting it together for you!
> 
> Title from "Photobooth" by Death Cab for Cutie, which is kind of a sad song but is also about being dumb kids during the summer, so it really lit a fire in my brain.
> 
> (Tiny sidenote: Ophelia and Odin are so tricky to write into a modern setting among other things because their very definitive speech patterns may possibly no longer make sense, haha. I couldn't find a place for them here, so I tried to convey some of the spirit of what gives these two their them-ness instead framed in light of something new AKA a huge mutual nerdy love for the sea, and I hope it works orz)

1.

Before today, Soleil has only ever watched the boats from a distance; out the window of her father’s car as they pull into the town, out the window of the rental shop as she and Ophelia color pages and pages of coral and starfish on the floor. Sometimes she’s come as far as the end of the pier, one hand in Ophelia’s hand and the other in the air as they wave to their families—their fathers and Ophelia’s mother framed against sky and water, bright paint and jutting outriggers, the whitest of the docked motorboats bearing them with gentle persistence away and away from shore. That far, but no further, and part of Soleil has always been thankful for the wood beneath her feet, for solid ground, even as she’s marveled at the ocean beyond.

This year they are nine-turning-ten and big enough to be taken on-deck, wrapped in blinding orange life-vests and warnings to hold on to the siderails. These little safeguards are somehow more than enough for Ophelia, and she leans out over the bars as Odin turns the key and the engine sputters awake, building slowly to a roar she soon needs to shout to be heard over.

“I wonder if we’ll see any sea snakes.” The sun always turns Ophelia red; her face and arms and legs are ruddy as the sunset they chase along the shoreline at the end of each day. But as they pick up speed and the wind begins to tangle in her hair, Soleil wonders if she’s begun to glow with something else besides. “They’re really venomous, you know—fifty times more than the ones on land.”

There’s a fluttering in the pit of her stomach she can’t help but feel embarrassed by, in the face of all this fearlessness. She tells herself it’s to be expected; Ophelia _lives_ by the sea, swims in it every day, has eaten up every single book about it she can get her hands on since they first learned to read. Soleil sees it only once a year, for anywhere between a week to three weeks in the summer, when her father takes her out to the eastern coast to visit with his two oldest friends and their daughter. Of course there’s still so much she doesn’t know. That by itself is nothing to be scared of.

She fusses with the buckles on her life-jacket—pulls the straps tight, loosens them again, pulls them tight, grinning to hide any nerves that she might feel. _“Fifty_ times?”

Ophelia beams and tosses her head. “The beaked sea snake can kill eight people with just three drops of venom.”

She finds it somehow hard to believe that a place like this, with its little shops and quiet roads and stretches of soft sand, could be home to _anything_ venomous, or otherwise dangerous, but it does get easier to imagine as the town drops away and the water closes in. She has the warnings from her father, from Odin, from Niles leaning toward her across the counter in the boat rental shop they run together. Be careful, Soleil. Be careful of the deepest deep, the patches of turquoise that deceive, that are just a bit darker than the rest. There’s danger in the water if you aren’t careful—but wonder, too, if you know where to look.

Soleil’s saved any further tidbits of knowledge about just how poisonous sea snakes are by Ophelia’s mother, Selena, who beckons her over to the bench across and dabs her cheeks and nose with a third coat of sunscreen. “You’re scaring her, Lia.”

“Nuh-uh. Soleil’s the bravest.” She tosses the words over her shoulder like a challenge before she breaks from her mother and from Soleil both. Without looking back she walks right up to the front of the boat to stand beside Odin at the wheel, arms spread out wide to catch the wind. She’s laughing and unafraid as he narrates the grand adventure about to unfold with her at its center—Ophelia of the Open Sea, Star-Upon-the-Water, who names the tides her own.

Soleil turns to her father and finds him facing backward towards the town with his camera at his eye. She tugs at the back of his shirt twice, lightly. “Dad, camera.”

“Oh! Here you go, love.” Laslow lifts the strap up over his head and settles it around her neck, shows her for the hundredth hundredth time where to put her hands to support its weight before she releases the shutter. “Careful, now.”

This, at least, is something she knows as well as Ophelia knows the sea, terrors and all. Soleil faces her, brings the lens to her eye, and clicks and clicks.

 

* * *

  

2.

Soleil receives a camera of her own for her eleventh birthday, an old instant one of Laslow’s he’s touched up especially for her. The following summer, she and Ophelia take turns with it on the beach, arraying the printed polaroids on a towel spread out beneath a giant umbrella and watching in almost reverent silence as the images develop.

It’s easy to tell at a glance who’s taken what. Soleil is a girl with hungry eyes and a father who tells her often and with great passion that the world is full of beauty, so maybe it only makes sense that her pictures are of everything, from all angles. The sky at dusk, the sea at midday, the half-shadowed faces of pretty strangers. Even something so seemingly ordinary as a stretch of rock being battered by the onrushing tide can be beautiful, if you look closely at every crag and crevice, at the burst and the bloom of the white foam when the water breaks.

Ophelia, meanwhile, seems to want mostly to take pictures of Soleil. Which might also make sense, if Soleil really thinks about it; she lives here, and her days are so full of this place that she needs no pictures to keep it close. Instead Ophelia turns her attention toward this one foreign thing, this one strange, at once new and familiar thing, for a season each year—something that’s only logical, and yet—

 _“Again?”_ It’s been three days and close to a whole box of film, and not all Ophelia’s shots are flattering. At this precise moment Soleil is flat on her stomach with her elbows half-sunk into the sand, hands cupped closed around the body of a frantically scuttling crab, absolutely certain the fresh image pinched between Ophelia’s fingertips will be anything but. “Am I really that pretty?”

Not that she cares all that much about being pretty, but there’s something about looking at herself through Ophelia’s eyes that makes her stomach turn over in a way that she can’t explain. Makes her feel almost shy, too aware all at once of her lanky limbs and the way her skin browns and freckles in the heat. Ophelia is _beautiful,_ with her sunshine-hair and the roses in her cheeks and all the other sweet-sounding words she hears her father use over the phone—she’s always thought so, which is why—

“You are, and I want something to keep when you go away again,” Ophelia says, smiling so brightly it’s like she’s trying to scatter glitter around the edges of the words, to keep them from coming out so sad. But they hang in the air all the same after she’s said them, so Soleil releases the crab in favor of catching hold of her free hand instead.

“C’mon. I wanna try something.”

That afternoon at the corner store they spend their money on fireworks instead of ice cream. When the sun goes down they light up their sparklers on the sidewalk outside the house, and the camera changes hands many times again as they take turns spelling their names in trails of yellow fire.

The pictures when they come out are blurry and distorted, but Ophelia loves them, and maybe that’s enough to make them precious. Soleil gives her the lot and keeps only one for herself. Half the frame is an explosion of sparks, blossoming outward—and, lit up against the darkness just behind, Ophelia’s laughing face, the warmest light in the night.

 

* * *

 

3.

They’re thirteen when they first start finding things they’ve outgrown, bathrobes and life-vests and sets of pajamas they can no longer share. Ophelia’s bed is somehow too small to sleep two. Soleil’s heels hang out over the edges of her borrowed house slippers.

This is a late visit, just after peak season. The beach is quieter than Soleil’s ever seen it, and sees no one but the two of them for hours at a time as they wander up and down the length of it, sandals in hand and the sand shifting and cool underfoot. Doing nothing. Talking. Gathering up forgotten plastic bottles, catching stray ice cream wrappers before the breezes can pick them up and blow them out into the water.

They leave the shells where they are, as they always have, but Soleil snaps photos of them to take back with her to the city. It’s a hand-me-down DSLR of Laslow’s she uses now, and while she’s still learning it inside out, the weight of it on the end of the strap around her neck feels important. Grown-up, almost, as she peers through its eye and focuses on the shapes in the sand. And to her surprise, the names Ophelia has taught her over the years come easily to her now too, so that she can match them to what she sees in no time at all—coiled gastropods, spiraling nautili, the fan-shaped scallop and cockle and clam.

After lunch, when the sun is at its highest, they go to the store. This, too, is the same and not quite the same as it’s always been—a can of soda and a popsicle to share, and seats on the bench outside that they never get to sit on at summer’s height. It’s too popular a spot, a favorite nesting-place for kissing couples or groups of rowdy boys with cigarette-roughened voices and brassy highlights in their hair.

But today it’s just them, and Soleil tastes watermelon on her tongue as she thinks about all the couples she’s observed out of the corner of her eye. Last year it had been a girl and a boy, two boys the year before that, though both times it was hard to tell; she’s since decided people kissing look less like separate people and more like strange human pretzels, all tangled arms and sticky lips and no lines to separate the edges of things anywhere.

(Both times, though, she snuck a photo. Just on her phone, at weird surreptitious angles, while Ophelia hid her laughter behind her hands.)

“You’re finishing it, Soleil.”

“Sorry.” She pulls the popsicle out of her mouth, only to find that now it’s more stick than anything else. “Want another one?”

Ophelia shakes her head and takes the stick from her hand before she can finish, chips off the last popsicle-shard with her teeth. “Don’t worry about it. This is enough for me.”

Even now, with the wind picking up and the days beginning to lean toward fall, there’s a glimmer in the air to remind them of the season just passed. A sheen, too, across Ophelia’s lips—partly watermelon ice, partly the balm her mother makes her use. Soleil’s own lips are cracked and raw, stinging, the skin on them pulling tight whenever she speaks or smiles.

(“You must be dehydrated,” Ophelia had said yesterday, sagely. They’d been sitting on the high stools at the kitchen counter, legs dangling, knees and elbows knocking together whenever they moved. Just that little bit short of not-quite-right-sized—she’d shifted to dig around inside her pocket for her chapstick and their ankles had caught against each other. “You need at least eight glasses, Soleil. Here. Use this; don’t lick your lips.”)

 

* * *

 

4.

There’s one year, the first time in a while that they can’t carve out a stretch of days to drive out to the coast. It’s a combination of ill-timed things—a colleague of Laslow’s gone on maternity leave followed by an influx of graduations and summer weddings, until he finds he’s booked through to mid-August and in real danger of running out of sensible neckties. Soleil makes it a point to face all her father’s late-night phone calls and doleful-eyed apologies with a smile. On afternoons that she’s alone at home, she irons his jackets and polishes his shoes, and busies herself with summer homework she’d normally have saved for the last week before school.

“I’m worried about Dad,” she tells Ophelia on the phone. Many of her evenings are for touching up last year’s photos, and for long-distance calls, the two of them talking late into the night as they already have a habit of doing in other seasons. “With all the work he’s doing this summer I don’t think he’s had time to go on any dates. Or, like, breathe.”

They are fifteen that year, turning sixteen in the fall. Soleil talks often of the gains that come with it—big, adventurous things like relaxed curfews, driving, dances, falling in love. The tradeoff is being more frequently caught in intimate conversation, with schoolfriends, only at times with Ophelia; the furtive, whispered kind involving tallies of how far they’ve all come. Questions that feel odd—have you ever...?

“Last night Forrest told me that Nina told him that she saw Sophie kiss Siegbert out on the pier.” Her voice is muffled, almost warped-sounding. Soleil imagines her in her high-backed swivel chair with her feet up on the seat, curled in on herself like a nautilus shell. “Can you believe that?”

“I _cannot_ believe that.” Soleil sinks down into her own seat and stretches her legs out across the floor. Incidentally, the photo she’s working on just at the moment is of the pier, although more to the point it’s of Ophelia, legs dangling, leaning down toward a swathe of water the color of ink. The sky behind her is the moody grey of a seasonal storm; Soleil clicks a couple of buttons, adds warmth, bumps up the brightness. “Please tell me Siegbert fainted right after.”

“Forrest didn’t say, but that’s what I imagine too. Nina’s mostly peeved Siegbert got a kiss before the rest of us.”

“Does _she_ want to kiss him?” Soleil snorts, and is rewarded with a giggle in response.

“I hope not! I didn’t think any of us did.”

 _Do_ you _want to kiss Siegbert?_ she almost asks, but decides at the last minute that it’s unnecessary, and more than a little rude to everyone involved. Soleil likes Siegbert. She likes all of Ophelia’s friends. Quite possibly the only thing she dislikes about any of them is that they get to be with Ophelia year-round, while she makes do with two weeks a year on average and a long phone call every other night, and a growing folder of photos she doesn’t know what to do with, for all the hours she spends editing them. She’s never asked, likewise, why Ophelia doesn’t insist on spending more time with them when Soleil does visit, and gives all her days to Soleil instead—whether this is because of their parents’ friendship or because of something else is just one more mystery she prefers not to think too hard about.

For her own part, there’s none of that going on. There’s a girl from school—an Anna, from the year above—that she’s been out with a few times for a movie here, a coffee there. Nothing deep or serious or romantic. Mostly it’s that she has a pretty face, and that it feels good to make her laugh, but they’ve both agreed that that’s all; nothing so important that there needs to be talk of kissing or being kissed.

“I never would have expected it.” Ophelia hums in her ear, soft and thoughtful. “Sophie was always asking me about you. After you went home last summer.”

“Was she, now?” Sophie, too, has a pretty face. Soleil wants to think she can handle pretty faces, at least enough to know that all her questions have to do with something else. “What’d you tell her?”

“Uh-uh. That’s a secret.”

They fall asleep on the phone some nights, always at a loss the next morning over who dropped away first. Soleil wakes on those mornings with a stiff neck and her phone still sandwiched between the pillow and her ear, and wonders if she prefers this discomfort to trying to sleep side by side in a too-narrow bed, elbows digging into ribs, long hair tangling up around each other’s faces and barely any room to breathe.

 

* * *

 

5.

“The stinging cells in jellyfish tentacles have these structures called nematocysts, like tiny harpoons full of venom. On contact they shoot out of the cells and into the flesh.” They’re on Odin’s boat, Soleil perched on the boarding ladder, Ophelia kneeling beside her on the deck and pouring vinegar over her arm. “Nematocysts continue to release venom even when they’ve been detached from the jelly, but the acetic acid in the vinegar neutralizes them in most cases, so it works as a topical pain reliever while you rinse the last of the cells off safely with salt water.”

“Does it have to be salt water?” Soleil asks, wrinkling her nose. The air around them is pungent, the glass bottle in Ophelia’s hand already half-empty.

“Yes, fresh water stimulates the nematocysts and causes them to fire. Always salt water, with marine cnidarians.” She leans in close to inspect the skin. “Jellyfish, you know, and coral and anemones. The name comes from the Greek _knidē,_ meaning ‘nettle.’”

After breakfast that morning they’d left Laslow and Selena reading in the garden, and set out with Odin on a boat to the vicinity of a small island off the coast, a little more than an hour’s ride away. There was a reef he said he’d been wanting to show them, not far from the surface, maybe only fifteen or twenty feet. _Safe enough for a pair of dolphins like you girls to dive to without life-vests,_ he’d said. _Just stay in sight of the outriggers and you’ll be fine. The current is gentle today, and the water’s clear._

So clear, in fact, they could already see the fish—the schools of electric blue, neon yellow, tangerine, darting curiously forward and speeding away just as quickly, enticing them to leave behind life-vests and snorkel tubes both. They’d held hands and then jumped, trusting their bodies to float as they dropped beneath the surface, kicking in circles to get a closer look at the coral. Soleil had started naming what she saw through the mask: on her right an assortment of alien brains, the green ones the dead kind and the red ones alive. The white ones right below her were giant spiders’ webs, and underneath Ophelia were sea stars, a galaxy of them all with arms outstretched and studded with black thorns and tiny crumbs of crystal, spiraling on and on forever. Beyond them and below, she could only just make out the blurry silhouette of Ophelia’s father, half a dolphin himself, the fins strapped to his feet working slowly up and down and never so much as skimming the seafloor.

She had felt the stinging first on her leg, then on her arm. Not the very painful kind of sting, the kind you could die from, more the kind that felt like some combination of an itch and a pinch, done by something she couldn’t see. She told Odin about it when they surfaced, and he and Ophelia had guessed it might be hydroids, whatever those were. Or floating jellyfish tentacles, or sea lice. Nothing that the vinegar and antihistamines they kept on-deck wouldn’t fix, and a bit of rest to see if it would raise a rash.

“Are you there, Soleil?” Fingertips on her arm, the touch feather-light and cool from the seawater. “Soleil?”

Past the pain, the truth is she’s only just coming back to herself. Two days Soleil’s been waiting for _just_ the right moment—to talk, to tell her something, even if a quiet voice in her head has also been telling her without mercy that she probably wouldn’t even know where to start. It’s like there’s some unspoken thought they’ve each been carrying, two halves of a secret that can only ever be made whole when they meet. Right now, staring at Ophelia with a hundred microscopic currents of electricity running under her skin, Soleil wonders if she’s beginning to understand what that secret might be.

“I think I’m dying,” Soleil croaks. Ophelia’s brow creases as though she’s about to scold her for being silly and she’s too dry-mouthed suddenly to insist that, somehow, she absolutely means it. It’s not a far cry to say that she’s meant it all her sixteen years.

“You shouldn’t say things like that,” Ophelia tells her, and she sounds indeed like she’s trying to be stern, but it comes out much too soft for that. There’s a warmth in her eyes that touches Soleil and spreads through her entire body.

There’s a secret that needs telling. Right. She opens her mouth to speak, because they don’t keep secrets, not when they’ve already given each other all their summers, but the inside of her head goes light and the way her body trembles has nothing to do with any venomous creatures they risk encountering under the water. _What should I say,_ she wants to ask, _do you know that I—_

Instead she leans forward—or maybe they both do, or maybe it’s a wave passing by, softly, just enough to rock the boat—and grips Ophelia’s upper arm loosely with her free hand and kisses her. It’s ill-aimed and clumsy; Soleil’s lips graze her cheek and the slanted angle of her jawline before they find her mouth at last, and she’s fully expecting it to end badly—so it’s a surprise, putting it mildly, when Ophelia slides her hands upward and hooks them together around the back of Soleil’s neck, and then suddenly she’s kissing her back.

Then, too soon in the distance beyond the outriggers, the sound of a body breaking the surface. Odin treading water and shaking the drops from his hair. Soleil draws away slowly, reluctantly, smiling when Ophelia doesn’t immediately open her eyes, her own field of vision full of nothing but brilliant, unbroken blue.

“I feel better now,” she says, and grins when Ophelia slaps her arm lightly just above the patch of stung skin, red and spotty but no longer sore, no longer even tingling.

“I’m glad, I guess.”

At some point on the ride back Ophelia’s arm curls through hers, fingertips resting against her wrist, and Soleil sways from side to side with the boat’s momentum, pulling her closer bit by bit until their shoulders are flush. It’s hard, but she somehow manages not to look too long when Ophelia catches her eye and smiles. Little poison wells in the currents notwithstanding, she tells herself there were a number of things worth finding in the deep.

 

* * *

  

6.

“Look here! Oh my god, Ophelia—Lia, look here! Look at me!”

They’re sitting together in a boat speeding away from the pier. Ophelia is behind the wheel, Soleil beside her with her camera at the ready. Neither of them are belted and jacketed as they ought to be. Their life-vests instead sit forgotten in the stern, which feels reckless, possibly dangerous, but not quite enough to deter them—they’re not going far, even if they _are_ going fast.

The wind is already making a mess of their hair. Soleil puts an absentminded hand to her head, feeling for her headband to make sure it sits securely. Ophelia’s is loose, whipped wild and tangled around her head like the stinging tentacles of some deep-sea creature. The frame is all hair when Soleil takes her picture, with the barest flash of smile.

“I have to keep my eyes on the road!” Ophelia admonishes her, waving a hand in front of the lens. “Or the water, as the case may be.”

The speedboat was a birthday gift, last October, a joint effort from her parents and from Niles. It had been plain white in the photo Ophelia took to send Soleil the day she got it, tied up at the pier all shiny and new and full of promise, but Soleil’s not surprised in the least to see that in the months since she’s covered the hull in decals of starfish and gold stripes. It does come as a slight surprise that she and her father have named it the Exalt—a flashy name, certainly, but with far fewer syllables that she would expect from the two of them.

It’s been eight years since she first climbed into the back of a boat; somehow now she sits up front and she’s not afraid. She doesn’t need to sneak her pictures of Ophelia, but takes them out in the open, and maybe that alone is worth every botched or blurry shot, each one that comes out clear rarer and more precious than a gem.

“Ophelia of the Open Sea!” she calls, pitching her voice loud and lower than she’s ever tried to make it go, the way Odin used to do whenever he told her stories of herself. Ophelia laughs, and she clicks at the shutter. “Star-Upon-the-Water!”

They circle the bay a few times, to while away the hottest part of the afternoon. Later they park the Exalt—or at least, that’s what it looks like to Soleil, Ophelia pulling a lever that looks like a gearshift and standing to heave the anchor overboard with surprising strength, considering—about a mile offshore, just far enough to see the beach from end to end, and the town beyond. Soleil offers her camera without speaking, watching as Ophelia climbs up onto the prow and sits cross-legged, snapping away at the view for what must be fifty frames without speaking.

They’re quiet for a while like this, adrift and alone together. When she finishes, Soleil comes up to sit beside her. “You gonna miss it?”

“Of course I will.” The breeze blows a lock of hair into Ophelia’s face, more gently this time. When she reaches up to push it back the camera around her neck sways on the end of its strap. Soleil looks down at her hands in her lap and finds them frozen, curled around nothing. “But I’ll always have it, I know. And I’m ready to make some dreams come true.”

Some of these are dreams they share, dreams that wash over and linger. They’ve discussed them a little—university in the fall, a dorm just two streets away from Soleil’s building, the possibility of classes together. Soleil wants to show her the park downtown where her neighbors walk their dogs, the movie theater with its sticky floors and its patchwork magic, the darkroom Laslow is building for her out of a spare wash closet. Soleil wants to ask her out for coffee, borrow her biology books, look at the drawings of rare fish that make their way into the margins of her notebooks. She wants so much to know Ophelia, as she knows herself, to find unceasingly that there is always more to know.

Soleil reaches out her arms to wrap her up in a hug, the two of them caught in the sunlight, salt and sunscreen and all the day’s heat on their skin.

“You and I both,” she says, grinning, and Ophelia relaxes backwards against her with a sigh.

These dreams are precious because they’re new. There’ll be chances enough to live them out later, when the seasons change—but for now, while summer still burns, Soleil decides the old dreams are more than enough. They can sit on the sand and draw shapes in it, watch the little crabs scurrying in and out of their holes. They can eat ice cream and light sparklers, and talk about things they know, not thinking of time. And at their leisure they can go hand-in-hand along with the current, wading waist-deep, and risk a walk through that blue-green garden, where the sea stars bloom.


End file.
